CAPTIVATING PHANTOM
The music to which Greta listened was unfamiliar. “Is it a song?” she
whispered, “or an evening prayer? Who can have written it? Perhaps no
one. It may have come direct from heaven.”
She could not believe it. Someone was playing that violin. Real fingers
touched those strings. She longed to search them out, to come before that
mysterious person of great enchantment and whisper, “Teach me!”
Ah yes, but which way should she go? Already the shades of night were
falling.
“No! No!” she cried as the music ended. “Don’t stop! Go on, please go
on!” It was as if the phantom violin were at her very side.
The music did not go on, at least not at once. Emerging from its spell as
one wakes from a dream, she became once more conscious of the goodnight
song of birds, the dull put-put-put of a distant motor, the cold black
rocks beneath her feet, the dark waters far below where some object,
probably Florence and Jeanne in the boat, moved slowly forward.
And then her lips parted, her eyes shone, for the phantom had resumed his
song of the strings.
* * * * * * * *
In strange contrast to all this, Florence continued her battle with the
big fish. In this struggle she was meeting with uncertain fortune. Now
she had him, and now he was gone. She reeled in frantically, only to lose
her grip on the reel and to see her catch disappear in a swirl of foam.
At last, when her muscles ached from the strain, the fish appeared to
give up and come in quite readily.
“There! There he is!” Jeanne all but fell from the boat when she caught
one good look at the monster. He was fearsome beyond belief, a great head
like that of a wolf, two rows of gleaming teeth, a pair of small,
snake-like eyes. And, to complete the picture at that moment over the
bottle-green waters a long ripple ran like a long green serpent.
“Florence!” she screamed. “Let go! It’s a snake! A forty-foot long
snake!” The slight little girl hid her eyes in her hands.
No need for this appeal. In a wild whirl of foam the thing was gone
again. But still fastened to his bone-like jaw was the three-barbed hook.
And the line, as Florence had said, was “stout as a cowboy’s lariat.” She
had him. Did she want him? Who, at that moment, could tell?
Strangely enough, at that moment one of those thoughts that come to us
all uninvited, entered the big girl’s mind. “What did that diver on the
black boat want on our wreck?”
No answer to this disturbing question entered her mind. They had left the
ship unguarded. They had come to Duncan’s Bay prepared to stay at least
for the night. That they would stay she knew well, for the wind was
rising again. To face those dark, turbulent waters at night would be
perilous. “What may happen to the ship while we are gone?” she asked
herself. Again, no answer.
* * * * * * * *
The melody, faint, coming from afar, indistinct yet unbelievably
beautiful, having reached Greta’s ears once more and entered into her
very soul, she stood as before, entranced, while the light faded. She
was, however, thinking hard.
“Where can it be, that violin?” she whispered.
Where indeed? On that end of Isle Royale there are two small settlements.
To reach the nearest one from that spot would require three hours of
struggling through bushes, down precipices and over bogs. The traveler
would be doing very well indeed if he did not completely lose his way in
the bargain. It was unthinkable that any skilled violinist would
undertake such a journey only that he might fling his glorious music to
the empty air about the Greenstone Ridge. It was even more unthinkable
that anyone could have taken up his abode somewhere among the crags of
that ridge. On Isle Royale there are summer homes only along the shore
line, and there are very few of these. The three hundred and more square
miles of the island are for the most part as wild and uninhabited as they
must have been before the coming of Columbus.
“It is a phantom!” Greta whispered, “A phantom of the air, a phantom
violin.”
Had she willed it strongly enough, she might have gone racing away in
fear. She did not will it. The music was too divine for that. It held her
charmed.
What piece was it the mysterious one played? She did not know or care;
enough that it was played. So she stood there drinking it in while
twilight faded into night. Only once had she heard such music. In a
crowded hall a young musician had stood up and, all unaccompanied, had
played like that.
Could it be he? “No! No!” she murmured. “It cannot be. He is far, far
away.”
Then a thought all but fantastic entered her mind. “Perhaps I have
radio-perfect ears.” She had heard of people, read of them in some
magazine, she believed, whose ears were so attuned to certain radio
sounds that they could receive messages, listen to music with their
unassisted ears.
“It has never been so before,” she protested. “Yet I never before have
been in a place of perfect peace and silence.” The thought pleased her.
And then, as it had begun, the marvelous music died away into silence.
For ten minutes the girl stood motionless. Then, seeming to awake with a
shudder to the darkness all about her, she snapped on her flashlight and
went racing over the narrow moose trail leading away to the distant
camping grounds of Duncan’s Bay.